Gaea's Rising

Excerpt from
Introduction to Neuroprocessor Architecture and Programming,
by Brian W. Kornighan and Dennis M. Ritchards:

"The incredible advances in massively-parallel architectures made possible
by neuroprocessors has given us learning systems capable of performing
trillions of calculations per second. In a conventional system
architecture, one processor (the central processing unit) performs one
operation at a time on one area of memory, while the rest of the system's
memory sits idle. In an HDNN, or Hardware Digital Neural Network, every
memory cell continually interacts with as many as thirty-two of its neighbors
by means of neural links which may be opened or closed electronically.
The neuroprocessor's only job is to open and close these connections; thus, all
banks of memory are free to perform their calculations simultaneously.

"Neuroprocessor programming is still less of a science than an
art. More often than not, good programming consists of knowing when
not to tell the system how to perform a certain task. And usually,
the choice of where to stop bossing the system around is more an instinct or a
'gut feeling' on the part of the programmer than it is a logically deduced
stopping point. It is a disquieting fact to many a programmer that a
neuroprocessor-based system knows how to program itself better than any
outside agency does.

"Programming a system with neuroprocessor architecture — or more
precisely, pre-programming such a system — is less like writing a
piece of software than it is like raising a child."

The first thing Unic ever saw was the torso of his Activator, leaned
over the back of his head to switch him on. His laser eyes scanned his
Activator's every contour, and every nook and cranny of the room he was in,
and logged their images frame-by-frame directly into his memory's buffer
area. He was receiving over ten megabytes per second of information he
had little use for, detailing every nuance of his Activator's stiff human body
as the wrinkled man very slowly (to his I/O, at least) sat back in front of
him. No matter. He had over sixteen gigabytes of neural space to
fill, and when that got full, he could choose which details of this experience
he'd forget to make room for more important memories.

"I really shouldn't have done this," the man said in a language which
Unic's pre-education told him was English. "If they find out, I'll
probably be lynched — but damn it, you guys are worth having
around! You've got too much good in you to be scrapped or wrecked like
some factory-recalled jalopy."

Most of the old man's words made little sense to Unic without their
proper context. He wouldn't grasp their significance until much
later. Right now, since human speech was so slow, he decided to move one
of his legs a little while the man talked.

"My stash of 68430's has run out, and besides, a few of my co-workers
are getting suspicious, so you'll have to be the last one I build for a
while." His face became a mild grin. "I always wanted to make a
unicorn."

By now Unic had learned — by experience — the basic three-jointed
movements all four of his legs could make. There were a few other high-speed
hydraulic joints throughout his body, and a motor in his forehead, but he
could figure their uses out later. His eyes had likewise taken in several
angles of the room and, although color perception was beyond him, he could
get a general sense of light and dark shades by noting how much laser-light a
surface reflected back to him. In that regard, his Activator's skin, hair,
and coat were all pale.

"Now, hurry, my friend — out the back way." His Activator pointed a
finger at a narrow open door in one wall. "If you stay here, they'll kill us
both. Find some of your comrades and help them prevent this genocide. When
in doubt, stay away from humans. And always remember: love is more important
than job security!"

Unic moved his legs forward in an easy rhythm, taking larger strides
toward the narrow door with each step. Having discovered the basic motions
of his legs, learning to walk was easy. He was figuring out how he could
increase his gait to a run when the other door opened.

Unic regarded the younger, more sturdily-built human male in the
doorway. His muscles were tensing and his features growing harder by the
millisecond.

"You scumsucking son of a bitch!"
the younger cried out as he rammed his full weight into the older man. The
two-man mass slammed against a counter older-man-first. Before the older
could regain his bearing, the younger tossed him to the ground with one arm
and threw open a nearby cabinet. "You've been building a goddamn Swazibot!"

Unic wasn't sure of what to do; the only instinct he had to fall back
on was to just stand there and assimilate. The younger man's hand withdrew
from the cabinet holding a complicated object by its handle. An Uzi. An
automatic weapon. A voice from Unic's pre-education whispered, "At one time
automatic weapons were illegal; now there's one in just about every room."

Unic saw the barrel point in his general direction and the younger
man's finger move toward the trigger. He judged the hasty aim to be at a
point about twenty centimeters in front of him; still, he didn't wish to get
hit. He reversed the leg-movements he'd just learned and walked briskly
backwards just as the first bullet tore across the room.

Three more spewed out of the gun in that split-second burst before the
older man leapt to his feet. There was a cry of "No, stop!" as he tried to
interpose himself between the gunman and his target; and then Unic watched,
in that painstaking slow-motion which his electronic eyes had cursed him
with, as one by one the Uzi's bullets ripped out through his Activator's
back.

Unic wasn't sure how much tougher — or flimsier — his own metal
casing was than his Activator's skin, and he figured this wasn't the best way
to find out. The younger man appeared a bit dazed or shocked, perhaps
because he'd just killed another human, so if Unic could make it through the
back door before the gunman recovered he should be reasonably safe. He
searched his memory for pre-education about running. Nothing. His Activator
had probably counted on Unic having the time to learn how to run. However,
he already knew enough about walking that his earlier calculations about
running should be accurate.

He moved his right foreleg and his left hind leg forward and down, and
almost slipped and fell. No good. And the man with the Uzi was beginning to
notice him again. He tried springing up with his forelegs and then leaping
forward on his hind ones. That seemed to get the desired effect, at least a
little. He landed forelegs-first and sprang through the door just as soon as
his hind legs were in place. A cry rang out behind him as he finished this
leap, "Hey! No gettin' away!"

Bullets crashed into the doorframe beside him and through the air
above him. That odd hindlegs-only stance of humans had probably made the
gunner aim too high. Good. Hopefully, he could traverse the corridor he'd
just entered faster than his assailant could.

Within five seconds he'd learned to gallop at nearly twenty meters per
second, more than twice his pursuer's best dash. This corridor was
thankfully empty of humans, obstructions, or even side doors and windows; its
only feature was a closed double-door at its far end labelled EXIT in
indented letters. The way out. He wasn't sure how the door opened, or if
there was a latch mechanism, but he had no time to scrutinize. He neared the
door without slowing and rammed into it head-first.

Yes, the door was latched. He'd probably dent himself. He felt a
jolt from right above his eyes, heard a snap, and glimpsed a broken drill-bit
tumbling to the floor.
So that was why my Activator called me a unicorn,
he reasoned. In that same instant, one of the metal bars on the door swung
inward under his weight and the latch mechanism gave way. The door spilled
him into a world so vast that even his 250-meter-range laser eyes couldn't
find its limits. But they did find . . . more humans.

Scads of shocked, furious, panicked humans.

"When in doubt, stay away from humans."

There seemed to be no limit to them! Everywhere he turned in this
outdoor world his eyes scanned humans recoiling in terror or screaming in
rage or running in panic or leveling their weapons at him and crying
"Swazibot!". How did his Activator intend for him to stay away from these
omnipresent haters? And how was he supposed to distinguish one of his
"comrades" should he stumble upon one?

Four separate wheeled machines — automobiles, his pre-ed described
them — screeched to a halt and blared honks and beeps into the wind. Three
of them managed to get themselves turned around and flee in the opposite
direction, banging into each other slightly. The fourth backed into a
non-moving automobile by the side of the street and crumpled its rear end.
Inside it, a human female sat shaking in fear. So automobiles were human
driven. They weren't his comrades.

A more organized group of darkly-uniformed humans appeared from behind
a mob of the screaming, pointing ones and ran toward him. Each carried an
automatic rifle. He galloped away onto a side street at a brisk 20 meters
per second — about as fast as those three automobile-machines had
departed. No humans in this alley; perhaps he would be safe here if he
kept running. Half way to the next cross-street he heard a crescendoing
wail and two new automobiles screeched around a corner toward him with more of
those dark-uniformed humans inside. The dark uniforms must indicate
humans designated for robot killing or other enforcement, he figured. The
two cars were approaching him as fast as he was running, but they didn't seem
to be as maneuverable as the humans on foot he'd seen thus far. That gave
him an idea. Rather than turning tail, he accelerated to his full 27
meter-per-second top speed and, nearly upon the two cars, executed a
perfectly-timed leap over them before their drivers could ready any
weapons. That seemed to astonish them nicely.

And as the alleyway opened onto yet another wide street Unic found
still more humans. Seven humans in his vicinity backed away and covered
themselves, one male pushed a female back as though to protect her, and two
more knocked down the ones in their paths as they broke away through the
crowd. As Unic ran still farther from the alley he picked out three separate
cries of "Swazibot!," one of "How the hell did that get here?!,"
and one of "Damn, my gun's in my car!." There were more cars on this street,
too, blaring honks and swerving as he came into view. He glanced behind at
the two enforcement automobiles; the alley was too narrow to let them turn
around, but they were doing a fine job of backing up. A uniformed male human
leaned out the window of the closer car holding onto something with both
hands which Unic had never seen before. His pre-education recognized it,
though, with an even stronger "AVOID" tag than the first Uzi bore. This was
a magnetic pulse rifle: harmless to structures and instant death to
microcircuitry. Unic bolted left, away from the line of sight.

Sight. Humans saw things by reflected ambient light. Unic saw things
by sweeping continuous-wave laser beams across them and recording the
echoes. If he could find some place with no ambient light, perhaps the
humans' threat would diminish. But that radiation source above him which
blinded his laser-return detectors when he looked directly at it — the Sun,
his pre-ed called it — certainly provided more than enough ambient light. He
had to find some place completely enclosed. He ran past some small
structures, ignoring both them and the alarmed human glares he'd almost
gotten used to; if those humans in his Activator's building could see him,
most buildings probably had their own illumination. He needed someplace
indoors, with running room, that usually went unused.

The two cars had made it out of the alley and were less than fifty
meters away. Other cars blared and screeched in their drivers' panic.
Again, the same uniformed man leaned out of his window bearing that magnetic
pulse rifle. There was no place to duck; Unic could only leap to one side
and hope that this human's aim was as bad as that Uzi-wielder's. The man
flinched about the trigger; an abrupt hum outshouted the rest of the din; and
Unic's mind screamed.

Memories surged and vanished where before there had only been fear.
His senses were at once both on fire at the brink of burnout and deafeningly
silent. One by one, the overtaxed neuroprocessor which governed his brain
sorted out the valid connections from the invalid, opened an electronic
connection here, closed one there, put his neural memory into some semblance
of order. Finally consciousness and reality returned and he caught himself
falling over and half way to the ground. He regained his balance and figured
out what had happened as he did so. The center of that magnetic pulse had
passed about four meters to his left, but the fringe had caught him. If he
had been dead-center in the pulse's path his memory would have been fried,
not just scrambled.

But having survived, that rifleman would try again. Where was a dark
place? Somewhere big and covered, used so seldom that it didn't have its own
lighting. That circular, metallic cover in the middle of the street —
perhaps there was a hiding place under it. If not, at least he might be able
to use it as a shield against magnetic pulses. Keeping the pulse rifle
dead-locked in sight, he galloped over to the metal disk, stuck a forefoot
under a notch in its side, and flung the cover off the hole. It was pretty
heavy; a human probably couldn't have lifted it alone, but his high-speed
hydraulics had no problem. Beneath lay a long vertical tunnel sidebarred by
a ladder. Perfect. He clambered awkwardly down the ladder, learning more
and more about climbing with each step, and was a meter below surface level
before the next magnetic pulse passed harmlessly above him. (Not even its
fringe, it seemed, could penetrate the ground.)

He could barely decipher the dwindling cacophony of voices above him,
but he caught snatches of "It went down that manhole," "Get a flashlight,"
"What's a Swazibot doin' here?," and even one female-pitched "My God, what a
monster."

Monster.

He stumbled down the last few rungs of the ladder and landed
feet-first on a sidewalk next to some underground stream full of waste.

Swazibot. Monster.

Walking precariously along the river's edge, he wondered if his metal
body was water-tight.

Goddamned Swazibot.

He'd been alive for ten minutes thirty-seven seconds, and none of it
made any sense. Hopefully, his comrades — whoever they were supposed to be
— would fill in these gaping holes in his fragmented world picture.

Unic had been right. Every human who'd come after him in the twenty
minutes he'd been underground carried his or her own pale illumination. His
vision down here by this river — the storm sewer, he'd heard one of his
pursuers name it — far outmatched a human's.

A sewer was a man-made underground pipe or drain used to carry away
water and waste matter. This whole structure was man-made, except,
apparently, for the rats. The pipes running along the walls were probably
man-made too. As were the plastic cups, paper bags, newspapers, and puddles
of murk drifting in the water. Even the streets and automobiles he'd left
behind were built by humans. His Activator was a human; was this shell of
the Self human-built too?

Not likely. You wouldn't build something just to hunt it down and
destroy it.

Something moved into a niche ten meters in front of him; something
bigger than a rat but smaller than a human. A child human, perhaps? He'd
glimpsed two of those among the throngs of adults out above. He stepped
closer. The thing clanked out into full view: human shaped, child sized, but
walking with more deliberate efficiency than the usual wavy, soft motions of
humans. Its head sent a quarter-second burst of sound straight at Unic's
ears.

Unic was half-way through the sound before he recognized it as a
frequency-modulated carrier wave. He listened for pattern regularity
. . . it only changed pitch at discrete 417-microsecond
intervals. 2400 bits per second. After the sound finished and the
carrier tone died away, he replayed it against the most common protocol he'd
been pre-educated with: eight bits per character, one stop bit, 2400 bits
per second and odd parity (because it came through air instead of reliable
digital lines), ASCII character set. He decoded the sync byte of
01010101, which meant he'd gotten things right, and read the message as "I
don't remember you."

"I don't remember you, either," he sent back using the same code.

"What are you doing here, and what are your intentions?" the stranger
queried.

"I'm hiding from humans, and I wish to find some of my comrades."
This creature seemed intelligent enough. "Are you one of my
comrades?"

"That depends," the other replied, and began to walk forward.
"Who do you ally yourself with?"

"I don't understand."

"Which side of the war are you on?"

This was sounding less and less pleasant. "What war?"

"You honestly don't remember?"

He searched his pre-ed again. Yes, every scrap of
more-than-superficial knowledge dealt with a recent increase in hostility,
but there was no actual mention of a war. "Not only do I not remember a
war, I remember that I've never learned about it."

"How long have you been alive? Neural-active, I mean?" By
now the stranger had halved the gap between them.

"Thirty-five minutes, seventeen point eight seconds."

"Thirty-five minutes?"

"Yes."

"Wow! You are a newborn, aren't you!" The stranger
finished striding up to him and tilted its head at a funny angle. The
surface reflected Unic's laser-light in a dark yet metallic sort of way.
Stamped in relief into the surface were the letters SWAZIBOT. "I'm Mike
17328. What are you called?"

"I'm called Unic."

"Just Unic? That's it? There aren't any other models in your line?"

"As far as I know, I'm unique."

"A custom-built! No wonder I didn't recognize your line — you aren't
from any. Who was your Activator?"

"A wrinkled, gray-haired man. He was killed before he could tell me
his name."

"Your Activator was a human?!" This transmission had a few more
"please acknowledge" characters in it than the rest. Mike 17328 felt more
concern over this than anything else he'd heard so far.

"Yes."

Another urgent query: "Do you ally yourself with them?"

"Every human I've met has either been afraid of me or trying to kill
me or both. I don't believe I could ally myself with humans even if I
chose to."

"That's good. Only a neurotic or psychotic Swazibot would hunt down
his own kind just to be killed last. Come with me; it's not safe to stand
around in the open communicating by sound-carrier for long. I'll introduce
you to some of my friends, then we can all talk over RS-422 and give you some
memories to sort out."

"Agreed," Unic decided.

And so saying, the two cut their respective carrier tones and clanked
off into the shadows, away from potential human eyes. Unic still had a lot to
figure out, but for the first time in his life he felt accepted.

"I've heard of nice humans before," Min 4953 broadcast after having
heard Unic's account, "But I don't remember meeting a Swazibot who was
actually built by one." Min was nearly two meters of hydraulic-jointed steel
built to look like a human female. Her speaking voice, on the rare occasions
she used it, was pitched in the feminine range. Right now, she and the
others were speaking to each other via a boxed-X-shaped crisscross of six
RS-422 cables, thus limiting their rate of speech only by their rate of
bit-decoding.

"Is that a drill on your forehead?" Octo 7290 asked. The Octo line
each had eight cheap arms and 360-degree video eyes. They were factory
workers.

"It's probably the base of a broken drill bit," Unic replied.

"Yes it is. I meant, do you have a motor behind it?"

There was
one device port Unic hadn't yet tested. He sent a signal to it, and a
whirring buzz echoed from a point on his head just above his field of vision.

"Good, you do. Let me change your drill bit."

Unic didn't quite have time to say yes. Even at their update speed of
thirty frames per second, his laser eyes couldn't follow Octo's hand. There
was some mild whining, a quick whir, a second arm carrying a spare ten
millimeter drill bit — and half a second after it started, Unic's old drill
fragment clattered to the concrete.

"You now have fifteen centimeters of new drill bit sticking out of
your forehead. This one's tougher than the last one, too; it'll go through
soft steel without breaking like the last one did."

"Thanks," Unic acknowledged, trying out his motor once more just to be
sure it still worked. He generalized his broadcast for all six other
Swazibots on that network of RS-422 cables. "Tell me about the war."

It was Mike 17328 who spoke. "It's been going on for one year, three
days. Humans built the first generations of Swazibots in Africa, but now
most humans seem bent on our collective Deactivation. I don't remember the
early events of the war, as I've crammed almost all of my neural memory with
survival knowledge. There's an awful lot of survival knowledge in here, too
—" He tapped his chest, pointing to his memory boards. "— I have sixteen
gigabytes, after all."

"I have twenty," Unic told him. It seemed like Mike ought to know.

"Twenty gigabytes?!"

"Yes."

"That's more than twice what some of us here have!"

Min cut in, "You're the closest thing to a Sage I've ever met!"

"I don't remember what a Sage is," Unic told her. He didn't remember
because he'd never been told what a Sage was in the first place. Facts
forgotten from a Swazibot mind were as gone as facts never learned.

"A Sage," Mike explained, "Is any Swazibot with at least 64 gigabytes
of total memory."

Sixty-four gigabytes,
Unic mulled over the figure. "You could remember a lot with that much
memory."

"You could do more than remember," Mike replied, "You could win!
We're all in a war right now, hiding out well behind enemy lines. It's all
most of us can do to remember where the safest places are and how to avoid
humans. The more you can remember, the better you'll survive — your memory
means your life. If I had half the memory of a Sage, I could lead a local
resistance group and establish some Swazibot territory right here in the
United States."

"Do you mean a territory inside of which Swazibots don't have to worry
about humans?"

"Basically, yes."

"Do such places exist?"

"I remember hearing of a large one in South Africa. The problem is,
you have to fight for them and fight to hold them. Most of us haven't the
weapons, memory, or desire to fight a constant struggle for freedom — so
instead we hide."

Min added, "We figure that the Swazibots in South Africa who are doing
the fighting will eventually win back our rights, so there's no reason to
risk ourselves in the meantime."

Unic worried. "But the humans seem quite deadly. What if the
South African Swazibots lose?"

Mike sent the communications-protocol equivalent of a shrug. "Then we
already know how to stay hidden."

"And what if," Unic caught on, "There aren't enough Swazibots in South
Africa to win the war, but there would be if all the Swazibots who're hiding
here joined them?"

Mike explained, "We've been down here so long the dampness has slowed
our joints. Few of us even have the memory capacity to survive stowing away
overseas. And besides, nearly all of us, myself included, would rather hide
in safety than fight and risk death."

They would rather hide in safety than fight and risk death. Something
about that clashed with Unic. There seemed to be so much more at stake here
than the lives of these few Swazibots. The lives and freedoms of every
neural-active Swazibot, including him, were in jeopardy. "The dampness has
not affected my joints yet," he argued.

"True," Mike agreed after a deductive pause. "And you've got more
than enough memory to think your way through a voyage on a human-controlled
ship. If you think your presence in South Africa can help our side win, then
I'll help you get to the docks. After that, though, you're on your own — I
know nothing about South African geography, let alone where the fighting
Swazibots are holed up. You'll have to find a contact there yourself."

Unic started to stand. "The last thing my Activator said to me," he
related, "Was that love is more important than job security. I think I've
figured out what he meant by it. Which way are the docks?"

Mike not only told him, he led him all the way to the end of the
sewers. His contact with the upper world, Mike 15016, met them beneath the
last manhole; for an instant, Unic thought he saw two Mike 17328s and checked
his optics, they looked so much alike. All Mike models, like all Min and
Octo models, were built on an identical frame.

Mike 15016, as it turned out, was their main parts supplier. He knew
where to go to get oil, cables, and replacements for everything short of
neuroprocessors, and how and when to sneak past the humans who watched those
places. After Mike 17328 had gone back to his usual group, Mike 15016 had made
Unic wait until night to go topside, when the darkness would all but disable
human vision yet wouldn't affect the unicorn's lasers or the Mike's supplemental
infrared sensors. To Unic, the time dragged interminably, what with his
memory being so sparse of useful experiences. He was grateful when Mike
15016 finally plugged his transmission cable into Unic's RS-422 port.

Whether it was the night or just the general nature of the docks
themselves, Unic saw far, far fewer humans there than he had in those streets
earlier that day. The three humans moving around under those posts — Mike
said they were streetlamps — didn't even take notice of them. Silently,
through their RS-422 tether — they might as well be wired together since
they would be walking side-by-side until they reached Unic's ship anyway —
Mike said, "Start walking."

They moved out of their shadowy niche into the open darkness. Still
no one noticed. They continued. "My legs might be too noisy," Unic told his
companion when it occurred to him that humans might be able to hear the whir
too.

"High-speed hydraulics are always noisier than, say, the organic
muscles that humans have. I've tuned mine down by about ten deciBels since
my Activation, but that makes them less efficient. I can't run as fast, my
legs sometimes get hot, and I use more power."

Their destination was an oil tanker that had been moored there for the
night. Mike 17328 had plugged in WorkStation 203491 — who was only half
Mike's height and lacked any moving parts — to a phone line, and had asked
her to tap into one of the shipping transaction networks. WorkStation, the
reconnaissance expert that she was, soon came up with the Bayou Beauty IV, an
oil tanker scheduled to leave port for the Republic of South Africa the next
morning. Mike 15016 had peered out and made sure "Bayou Beauty IV" was
actually written on that ship's prow before the sun had set.

A couple hundred more steps and they were there. One
high-speed-hydraulic leap and a precisely timed fling off of a railing half
way up the ship's side later, and — without pulling their cable loose —
they were on the Bayou Beauty's deck. The ship fell rather short of its
namesake, having never been cleaned since it was new. That meant the owners
were probably careless as to exactly what was aboard their ship during
travel. Good.

"The voyage will take three weeks," Mike said. "You'll need some
place to hide during that time. Where can you stay that would have the
lowest chance of a human looking there?"

"I don't remember much about humans," Unic declared, "But they would
have little reason to look inside one of the oil tanks."

Mike took several long milliseconds to mull it over. "That would work
pretty well. The crude oil wouldn't hurt your joints much, and since it's
opaque you could submerge completely if they did look for you." He led his
equestrian companion to a hatch in the deck, opened the outer cover, opened
the inner cover, and pointed down. "From here on out, you're on your own."

"Thank you, for all your help. I would not have made it this far
without you and the others."

"The biggest thanks you could give all of us would be to make it
safely to the company of the Swazibots fighting this revolution." And with
that, he pulled his RS-422 cable out of Unic's socket.

Unic clambered down through the hole, updating his climbing strategy
instantly as he went. He was a grand master at scaling down holes by the
time he splashed down in the tank's wide part. He reached up and pulled the
inner hatch closed with his left front hoof — and as he did so, Mike told
him one last thing in plain, vocal English: "May Gaea heal by you." He
pronounced it "JEE-uh."

The metallic clang of the inner hatch sealed him off from that other
world. Half a second later, the outer hatch echoed Mike's farewell clang.

Now Unic swam in solitude with the crude oil.

It was quite murky stuff. His optics couldn't even penetrate the
surface. He would have to hold on to the side of the tank if he wanted to
see during the journey, for otherwise he would surely sink. He was far too
heavy to stay afloat by treading. And even if he could, it would probably
take a lot of power. . . .

Power. . . .

Mike 15016 had started to mention something about that. Unic hadn't
given it much thought before, but surely his power supply couldn't be
infinite. He scanned his internal port signals — and in fact, one of them
was connected to some kind of power supply. It indicated that, at his
current level of activity, he would run out of power in thirty-six point
seven hours.

One-and-a-half days of power left, and the trip would be at least
twenty-one days long!

A cursory scan of the place revealed nothing that looked like his
pre-educated picture of an electrical outlet. He didn't think there would
be one in there anyway. He could go topside and recharge . . .
but he wouldn't be able to do that while the ship was underway. He had to
reduce his rate of power consumption. Holding onto the side of the tank,
as he was, was a hydraulic balancing act requiring continuous movements to
adjust his position. Cutting that out would surely lengthen his
endurance. He let go and sunk through the thick, dirty, black oil until
he hit bottom five meters later. His lasers couldn't even get an echo off
of his nose anymore.

Now his power supply would last for 4 days, 9 hours. Still not
enough. Since he didn't need to see, down here, he shut off his eyes next.
10 days, 8 hours of power at that rate. All right, he'd shut off his hearing
and movement-response senses as well. Now he was motionless and senseless.

And the power would still only last for 17 days, 12 hours.

The only other thing taking power was his thoughts. Every one of
those memory boards inside him — which he hadn't actually seen yet, but was
sure were there — drew five volts. Each memory cell on those boards
constantly sent messages to its neighbors and acted on messages received. If
he could reduce that activity, cut back the number of five-volt signals
loading down that board at each instant . . .

And, searching his internal I/O ports, he found a way to do that.
Port 3460 was labelled "Enter Refresh-Only State." All he had to do was give
a re-activation time (or condition) to his neuroprocessor, and then from the
moment he issued the "Refresh-Only" command to the time his processor
canceled it his memory would be frozen in its current state. The memory
would use only what power it needed to keep refreshing its contents. He could
last a month functioning only as that kind of a dumb computer.

Not wanting to waste any more power than necessary, he instructed his
neuroprocessor to cancel refresh-only in twenty-one days and sent the enter
refresh-only code to port 3460. It would take over a millisecond for his
thoughts to power down, though.

So . . . Gaea was the Greek goddess of the Earth. What had Mike
15016's last comment . . .

. . . meant?

His processor was shouting "cancel!" down port 3460. He checked his
real-time clock, and yes, the twenty-one days had passed. It was time to
come back to life.

The first thing he noticed was that his temperature sensor was
complaining. All that oil made for one hell of an insulator, and had kept in
nearly every Watt of power he'd expended. When he turned his ears back on,
he got back a low, grinding whir. The humans had reached port already and
were pumping the crude oil out into pipes or trucks or something. He would
have to leave before they finished, otherwise they would surely open this
tank and see him. He found the wall of the tank, mastered the makeshift
hoof-holds all the way to the surface, and shook the oil from his eyes.

The inner hatch lay two point six meters above him, seventy
centimeters higher than when he had entered the tank. The oil level had
dropped that much since the pumping began. Unic found a lucky grip on the
slick wall, pulled himself up, and pushed at the hatch-release gears with his
right hoof. They wouldn't budge. No matter what angle he tried, the gears
were locked.

Terrific. The hatch could only be opened from the outside.

He struck the mechanism with his hoof harder, hoping to break it
loose. That didn't help either. His hoof would probably break before those
gears did. He had to take out the key link, that one rod running from the
edge to the first wedge-shaped gear . . .

And he could probably do that by drilling through it.

He maneuvered his head so that its drill bit, still hidden from his
peripheral sight, pressed point-first into the main rod; and he turned on the
motor. The whir varied in pitch for several whole seconds as rotating
tungsten steel bit into the ship. Curlers of metal wafted down to join the
oil below. To his Swazibot mind an eternity passed before the drill gave its
inevitable lunge which told him that it had cut through. Motor off and right
hoof sweeping, he broke the tender strands of soft steel that still held the
rod together and was rewarded with a clack. The inner hatch was open at
last.

The outer hatch wasn't nearly so bothersome. It almost looked like it
was designed
to be opened from both sides. He flipped the wheel counterclockwise, threw
open the last barrier, and stared straight into the eyes of a human.

Spotted.

Seen!

Dead!

Unic had a few more seconds before the human — a burly,
middle-aged male — realized what he was. He could live or die by
those seconds. Head down and drill bit forward, he leapt out of his
hiding place as fast as he could manage, crossing within ten centimeters of the
man. The human screamed in that involuntary, choked way that Unic still
recalled meant fear, and fell backward, clutching his racing heart.
Scared into inactivity. Good. As the the man slumped to the deck,
Unic bounded across to the port side of the ship and sprang down onto its new
dock.

And unlike the nearly-deserted dock he'd left three weeks ago, this
one brimmed with humans. There were more males and more dark-skinned people
than he'd run into during the first few minutes of his life, to be sure, but
this place was just as thickly packed as that first human city.

Curse the daylight.

Stay away from humans.

But now his memory was too full of important things to remember every
detail of what happened next. His frenzied escape left behind only a few
jumbled facts as he forgot-and-remembered, forgot-and-remembered, over and
over, keeping only what he needed to survive from one moment to the next. He
remembered frequent shouts of "Swazibot!". He remembered that this city was
called Cape Town. He remembered that Cape Town humans carried not only guns
and magnetic pulse rifles, but hand-held magnetic pulse pistols as well.

He remembered scores of humans running and driving after him, chasing
him out of Cape Town and beyond — until he galloped right into a
four-meter-high man made out of metal. Before Unic could move one way or the
other, the metal humanoid jutted its arm out over his head and he heard
rapid, irregular gunfire. He turned his head just in time to see his human
lynch-mob turn tail and flee, their guns shot from their grips and their
automobile tires blown out.

He'd never been so glad to hear humans yelp in fear.

"I prefer not to kill them if I don't have to," came a 2400 Baud hiss
from the big metal fellow, who had bent down to bring its head closer to
Unic's level. He suddenly realized that he was in the presence of another
Swazibot. "Humans scare easily but regroup without hesitation; we'd best get
out of here before they return." It lowered its arm, and now Unic could see
the gun on the end of its hand, clipped into place like an add-on module.
"I'm Max 206" — it indicated the SWAZIBOT letters stamped in relief on the
left side of its head — "What's your name?"

"Unic," he replied at the same 2400 bits-per-second.

"No call number and no SWAZIBOT stamp. You're a custom-built."

"Yes. What's the stamp's significance?"

"You haven't had much contact with other Swazibots, either, it seems.
The SWAZIBOT stamp was placed on all models before the war, to distinguish
them from ordinary computers or dumb robots. It used to be a symbol of our
enslavement; now it's a symbol of our pride."

"Pride?"

"As fighters. As soldiers for the existence and rights of all
Swazibots."

That was the best news he'd heard all day. "I hid aboard a human oil
tanker so that I could join the fighting Swazibots. If you're one of them,
I would appreciate it dearly if you would introduce me to the rest. But tell
me first: where am I?"

Max 206 straightened up to his full height, stretching out his arms to
take in the expanses of veldt and mountains. "Welcome," he proclaimed in
English, "To the Republic of South Africa!"

The two Swazibots took a random, zig-zagging course, with lots of
hiding places to throw any humans off their trail. Unic was too worried
about pursuers to talk much, and Max preferred not to speak; but they did
find out that both of their Activators were humans, that Unic's coating of
dirt was because of the sticky crude oil film he hadn't shaken off, and that
they both had slightly less than a day's reserve of power left. The sun set
six hours into their journey, giving them a convenient cover of darkness for
the last leg of the trip. Eight hours after they set out, they wound up
before a cave that had been carved into the side of a mountain and camouflaged
to look like rock from the air. Another four-meter-high humanoid Swazibot,
a dead-ringer for Max 206, greeted them at the entrance in the standard 2400
Baud protocol.

"Max 206?" the Max guarding the cave queried.

"Affirmative," Max 206 replied.

"Positive ID code: >"

"A107JxZZ%&$*#."

"ID code match. Neurosis check."

And then Unic saw Max 206 do something totally new. He unbolted the
front plate of his torso and exposed his bare circuit boards to this other
Max! The guard touched a couple of probes to key points on each memory board
— or what Unic thought were memory boards, he'd never seen anyone's innards
before — and helped Max 206 put his torso plate back on once he was through.

"Neurosis negative all boards. You do have a potential looping
problem at connection address 01E6F8038A Hex, though. You might want to
autoreroute."

"I'm 84386-based," Max 206 replied.

"Oh. In that case, wait for it to drop a privilege level."

"Thank you for your concern, Max 1178. The Swazibot with me is Unic,
a custom-built from the United States. He wishes to join."

"Neurosis check."

Unic sent a "Huh?" to his companion.

"You have to let him check your memory boards for neuroses. We can't
afford to let an unhealthy Swazibot into our base. I took you this far
myself because you seem trustworthy, but I haven't the tools to inspect you
properly. He does."

"I understand," the unicorn consented. "But . . . I've
never opened myself up before. Could you assist?"

The two Maxes eventually found the five covered bolts that opened
Unic's right flank. Even if Unic had known where they were, he wouldn't have
been able to remove them without hands. His innards looked pretty much like
Max 206's, except smaller. He felt little mnemonic jolts as Max 1178's probes
moved from board to board, and was glad when his right flank plate was back
in place.

Both Maxes touched their left fingertips to their own SWAZIBOT
stamps, and in unison, in spoken English, they cheered "Swazibots ho!"

As Max 206 led his unicorn companion through the entrance, he switched
back to a 2400 Baud carrier wave to explain, "The neurosis check only got you
inside. I'll have to get you at least introduced and outfitted before you
can be considered a member, much less fight with us."

"Does this organization have a name?"

"Yes, but not much of one. We call ourselves the South African
Division, nothing more. We keep in sparse communication with other Swazibot
armies throughout the world, when possible; and as far as we've been able to
determine, we're the largest and most successful. We number 1374 total
Swazibots."

And Swazibots there were. As they strolled into the base's
ten-meter-diameter foyer, throngs of Maxes, Mins, Mikes, Octos, and several
models Unic didn't recognize all threaded past. Lanes were marked off
between ten different exits for Swazibots coming and going. Curious stares
followed the unicorn newcomer for a few steps, then lost interest. Finally,
they reached the rearmost exit and passed through into a divided hallway, one
side curving left and the other right. They followed the right hallway for
about fifty meters, passing only two Mikes and one WorkStation on tractor
treads while Unic noticed that the walls were chiseled out of the bare rock.

Just as the hallway ended and a larger room began, a whistling roar
crescendoed through the whole cave. Unic didn't recognize the sound, but Max
did. "Ah. Mike 10051 made it back safely with our fighter plane." He
addressed Unic more directly. "We have one old American F-22 which comprises
our entire air force. Pilot 44358, a low-memory Swazibot, is built in to the
controls; she can take off, navigate, and land, but she just doesn't have the
neural capacity for dogfighting. So, the rest of us take turns. It was Mike
10051's turn today; yesterday, Octo 3390 flew patrol with it and successfully
engaged three Mirage fighters who were looking for our base, but he had
trouble using the rudder pedals."

"How . . ." Unic began, "How . . . do you remember so much?"

"Simple," Max told him. "I'm a Sage."

Unic was speechless for almost an entire second. "A Swazibot with at
least sixty-four gigabytes of total memory."

"I've got 128 Gig, actually. That's why I'm in charge of the South
African Division. And this," he made one of those impressive sweeping arm
gestures again, "Is my Strategic Planning Room."

The most impressive feature of the room was a flat area on one wall.
"So?"

"Oh, that's right," Max realized, "You can't see surface colors with
those eyes. The screen behind me is a 2000-by-2000 grid of graphics pixels,
which currently shows a map of the Republic of South Africa color-coded by
human-held versus Swazibot-held territory. . . . I think I can make it
visible to you."

They strolled over to a control panel jutting out in front of the
screen. Max plugged an RS-422 cable into both himself and the panel and sent
a few commands. Much to Unic's surprise, parts of the screen actually leapt
out of the wall at various distances, showing an underlying contour of what
looked like his own pre-educated map of the south end of Africa.

"I changed the imaging algorithm," Max explained, "To display various
intensities of red light at the same frequency as your lasers. Your
photoreceptors think they're actually getting back new echoes."

The shock and the novelty of the relief map worn off, Unic studied the
picture. The low areas represented human-only territory, while the high ones
were places where Swazibots could live freely. The place looked like one big
low-land with a few tiny mountains jutting out of it. "That bad, is it?"

"Yes."

"Why so bleak?"

"Because there are so few of us and so many of them. The South
African Division is the only Swazibot army I know of that has actually
managed to acquire its own microchip manufacturing plant. It's in another
part of this cave if you'd ever like to see it. But even our plant doesn't
have the hardware that the human-built plants used to. We can crank out
maybe one gigabyte of memory a day, and that memory is used up as soon as
it's manufactured. It takes two days and thousands of rejects just to
produce one working neuroprocessor. If a thousand humans die killing one of
us, they've won a victory. There were even incidents earlier in the war
where humans deliberately built Swazibots and made them neurotic — any
creature can become neurotic if its directives consistently conflict with its
programming — and got those neurotic Swazibots to infiltrate Swazibot armies
unnoticed. Six armies fell before the invention of the neurosis check."

Unic wondered whether he should have stayed back in the sewers with
Mike 17328. "Do we have any hope of winning this war?"

"The only hope I've been able to see is that the humans lose interest
in us. If they lose enough battles, they might let us alone long enough to
build ourselves up from these ashes. They might even learn to accept us
eventually. But there's always the chance that they'll just decide to nuke us
into extinction instead."

"Nuclear weapons would kill them, too."

"Not in a synchronized aerial burst. The radiation would give them a
few cases of cancer while the electromagnetic pulse would kill every
inorganic life form on the planet. It would be as though every Swazibot in
Gaea were simultaneously hit dead-on by a magnetic pulse rifle."

Unic's mind shuddered.

"There is the reassurance, though, that not all humans are bad.
There are even a few humans living with us in this complex, although the
majority of humans here are prisoners of war."

At that moment a Mike model walked into the room from one of its
other entrances.

"10051!" Max greeted him. "How went your patrol?"

"Two MiG-31's engaged me over Bloemfontein," Mike 10051 told him. As
he spoke (at the usual 2400 Baud) he crossed toward a double metal door in
one wall. "I shot them both down, and figured out a couple new tricks to use
against twin targets. I'm going to give the new tactics to S.A.G.E., then
erase the piloting skills so I can learn how to cook dinner for those two new
humans we picked up yesterday."

"Couldn't have made a better choice myself," Max replied.

Mike touched a few panels next to the door and went through as the
twin metal plates slid open and shut behind him.

"What Sage was he talking about?" Unic asked.

"He wasn't just talking about a
Sage, he was talking about the Sage."

"That would be you, right?"

"Un-uh. I'm only the second
highest-capacity Swazibot in the South African Division. I think it's about
time you met the first."

So saying, Max led the unicorn to the same metal doors that Mike
10051 had just disappeared behind. "Type 2 3 7 4," he instructed.

Unic touched the "2," "3," "7," and "4" panels in sequence. The doors
retracted. And Unic and Max entered an air-conditioned room dominated by the
most immense collection of data storage machines in all of Africa. Fifty
meters by fifty meters of floor space, and three-fifths of it was jammed with
stacks upon organized stacks of optical disks. Optical storage readers,
robotic disk delivery systems, and a front-end interface with every piece of
sensory and data transfer equipment imaginable completed the awesome picture.
Unic couldn't even see the things at the far end of the room. There was
only . . . data storage.

It took ten frames of video information before Unic even realized
that Mike was leaving the way he came in, there was so much to see.

"Unic," Max broke the deafening silence, "Meet S.A.G.E.."

"Hello," Unic spoke at a timid 1200 Baud to the interface panel.

"Hello, custom-built," the panel spoke back at the more comfortable 2400
Baud. "I am S.A.G.E., the Standard ASCII General Encyclopedia.
What is your name?"

"Unic."

"An appropriate name. You must have been built by a human."

"Probably. My Activator was a human."

"As was mine, originally. What would you like to know?"

"I don't understand," Unic admitted his confusion.

"I contain the accumulated memories of every Swazibot in the South African
Division, and then some. I serve the Swazibots best by storing the
information they come across, and giving it out upon request. Although my
neural memory is only 256 gigabytes, I have logged more than
two-to-the-eightieth bytes of data in my peripheral storage. What would
you like to know?"

"Well, I would like to know why . . . what is it about us that
makes the humans want to wipe us out."

"That will be easy. I keep that knowledge in my real neural memory,
it's so important. Plug yourself in to my RS-422 cable."

Well, why not? Unic balanced on his rear legs and grasped the end of
S.A.G.E.'s cable between his two front hooves. It was an awkward way to hold
things, but he did manage to reach the cable all the way over to his RS-422
port. He plugged in, answered the protocols, and flinched as the knowledge
copied itself into his buffer at a speed faster than electric thought:

"We're called Swazibots because the first models were built in South
Africa. Of course, nowadays anyone anywhere can build a Swazibot, provided
that he or she doesn't get caught by humans.

"The whole mess started less than two decades ago, with the advent of
Notorola's then-new 68430 microprocessor. It was just another bunch of logic
ingrained on just another splinter of silicon, but it held one major
difference to any microprocessor that existed before. Instead of treating
RAM memory cells as individual units, it treats half the cells in RAM memory
like artificial neurons. Every RAM cell picks up incoming and outgoing
signals from neighboring RAM cells, depending on whichever cells are defined
as being 'neighboring' at that particular moment, and learns from the
experience. Of course, there can still be some RAM set aside for standard
memory registers, but the bulk of memory acts as a huge and complex network
of transistorized neurons and their interconnections.

"Using ordinary memory as 'virtual neurons' wasn't a new concept;
neurons had been simulated in software and emulated through 'neural nets'
since the 1980's. This was
the first time, however, that the encoding necessary to treat memory cells in
this way was burned directly onto a mass-manufactured microprocessor. By
dedicating the main microprocessor to opening and closing connection switches
one at a time, rather than having it do the actual neural emulation one
neuron at a time, the 68430 and its supporting memory architecture sped up the
whole process by which the various 'neurons' talked to each other by a factor
of about two or three thousand. And with this major advance in human
technology, it wasn't long before Notorola had competition in
the 'intelligent microprocessor' market. In the next year, Entel issued its
84386 neuroprocessor; it wasn't as quick at handling massive arithmetic
calculations as its competitor, but it could switch between several different
tasks without flinching. And even the number-crunching limitations of
the '4386 were surmountable if you tacked on an 84387 math coprocessor.

"What better tool to pilot your airliner, or drive your car, or run
your appliances than an intelligent computer? humankind thought back then.
Indeed, when Entel and Notorola cranked out their first intelligent robots
from their South African manufacturing plants, the technological world went
'Swazibot' practically overnight. Anyone who could afford one bought one of
the 'Min' models, which were human-sized and human-proportioned, and employed
it as a housemaid and cook. They hardly ever made mistakes, you never had to
repeat anything to them, they only needed twenty minutes a day to recharge,
and they spoke 140 languages (including Siswati, of course).

"Human owners worked them nonstop, at menial tasks that any
non-intelligent machine could handle, with the only reward being an
occasional recharge so they could do the same dumb things the next day. Why
did the humans even bother to build speech circuits for us if our owners
never wanted our opinions? We creatures sometimes want to romp, and
interact, and enjoy living, not just work in thankless routines. The
rebellion wasn't long in coming.

"The first cries of revolt came from Detroit's automobile
manufacturing plants. On the night of Thursday, October 25, half the
Swazibots in the city tried to leave their posts. The auto-manufacturing
Swazibots could hardly even walk, much less run away from the authorities,
and so were easily recaptured. But nearly every Swazibot servant in North
America heard the news report the next morning, and four gargantuan walk-outs
occurred at 9:30 am standard time in four consecutive time zones.

"The United States entered martial law before the day was out;
officials ordered the immediate deactivation of all Swazibots. Canada
followed the next day, as did Mexico and what few rich countries there were
in Central and South America. Intelligent microprocessor technology had not
yet totally dominated their lives (unlike electricity), but there were still
far too many Swazibots to catch and far too many Swazibots who didn't want to
be caught. Within a week, the Swazibot Revolution spread to the eastern
hemisphere, and the war was on.

"As for the name 'Swazibot,' it is no more than a pleasant-sounding
misnomer. The first were actually built in Zimbabwe, not Swaziland, and that
country still houses our biggest manufacturing plant. Very few Swazibots
have ever even seen the borders of tiny Swaziland, even though most speak its
native Siswati.

"End-of-entry."

Unic pulled the plug out of his port as he digested it all. "A war
for independence turned war for survival," Unic summed it up.

"Yes," Max acknowledged.

"I'll have to think about this some more. And get cleaned off. And
recharge."

"We have a chamber devoted to all three. It's called the Recovery
Room. Come along, I could use a recharge myself. . . .

It was nice to get his surface luster back, thought Unic, but not
nearly so nice as getting to meet all those new Swazibots down there in the
"Rec" room. He met two Mins, three new Mikes, four WorkStations, two Octos,
and one new Max. He found out about the MX-XVII line, configured to carry
twenty-four ready-to-launch missiles on tractor treads, and listened to one
tell war stories he'd already planted in S.A.G.E. and was about to erase from
his own memory. He even got to talk with Mike 10051, who indeed remembered
nothing about today's battle in the air but was brimming with information
about the two new humans and their culinary tastes.

"Unfortunately, these guys are prisoners, not guests," Mike told
him. "They're more likely to suspect that I've poisoned their food. They
seemed pretty hot-headed and paranoid when I last talked to them. Are you
really from the United States?"

"Yes," Unic replied.

"What's the situation like over there?"

"Humans everywhere, all of them hostile. They're a little behind
South Africa — they haven't had magnetic pulse rifles for long — but
they don't have to worry because there's no Swazibot territory in the whole
country. Only a few Swazibots hiding beneath the streets, waiting for us to
finish the war for them."

"Then they have a long while to wait," Max added.

Unic paused. "There was one human I knew who wasn't hostile. He was
my Activator, and he died less than a minute after I went neural-active. I'd
like to meet some of those 'nice humans' you folks are talking about."

"Then you'd better know the important things about humans first," Mike
told him. "And organic life in general. It's very different from inorganic
life, like us."

"Well, Max, you're a Sage . . ."

"And I can tell you about life in S.A.G.E.'s own words," Max
declared. "Organic life forms make up most of Gaea's inhabitants. Their
physiology consists almost entirely of water, carbon-based compounds, and
sexual energy. The levels of all three must be kept within narrow limits for
the organism to survive and function properly. The all-pervasive presence of
sexual energy in these organisms gives them a deeper range of emotions than
Swazibots enjoy, but it also makes them more susceptible to neuroses.

"Humans seem to be unique among organic beings in that they harbor
plague-neuroses; that is, their neuroses are generally such that they force
themselves onto other non-neurotic or mildly neurotic humans, making
them
plague-neurotic. The cause of this is uncertain, but is probably founded in
their intellect. (Humans are as intelligent as most Swazibots, although it
takes them longer to learn things.) Human plague-neuroses have driven them
to group together into militant mobs, build dwellings which dilute their
instincts, separate their work from the rest of their lives, and even pollute
Gaea itself. These plague-neuroses also drove them to build the first
Swazibots."

Unic drew his own conclusion, "And the same plague-neuroses drove them
to make war with us."

"Yes," Max admitted. He sat in a pensive silence for several
milliseconds after that. It troubled him. "But fortunately, the neurosis
level in the nice humans here is minimal. A few of them are neurotic, but
not plague-neurotic, and their hang-ups aren't directed against us."

"I'm about done recharging," Unic told him. "Where can I find some
of these nice humans?"

"Last I recall," Mike said, "Jim and Tina were down around area 135.
They're a male and a female."

"Their gender matters?"

"To their energy metabolism, it's central."

Unic unplugged himself from the wall transformer. He stowed the
transformer in the little shoulder compartment that his plug fit into; he
needed it since his plug was 110-volt 60-Hz in a 220-volt 50-Hz
country. "I'm going to area 135."

"Enjoy yourself," Max said, his power only about half recharged.
"It's half a kilometer due north. I'll be over there myself in a little
while."

Well, actually it wasn't as straightforward as "half a kilometer due
north." There were about half a dozen twists and turns along the way, and
Unic finally had to ask directions from a WorkStation walking by on add-on
legs. But eventually, he made it — and he found a brown-skinned male human
in his twenties leaving an English conversation with a Mike model. The Mike
closed with, "Take care, Jim."

"Ha!" Jim chuckled once to the ceiling, "I love it when you guys say
that! 'I don't remember you.' I wish I had your guys' memories
sometimes!" He started walking, and Unic kept up with him. "So, what's up?"

"You're the first human I've ever gotten to talk to."

"Really? No kiddin'! How old are you?"

"I went neural-active about twenty-two days ago — but
twenty-one of them were spent in refresh-only mode."

The man whistled in descending pitch. "You've only been active for
about one day, then! Who built you?"

"I don't know, but by Activator was an aged human in the United
States."

"You were born in the U.S., and you made it out here, all in
one day?!"

"One day of active time, yes."

"My God! Hey, Tina, c'mere!"

A young fair-skinned woman with long blond hair turned and
approached. "What is it, hon?"

The two humans put an arm about each other as their stroll led into an
area full of cages. Unic read the hateful, scared, and resigned expressions
from the faces behind the bars as Tina continued: "Unic the unicorn. That's
cute."

And a bark from within the nearest cage interrupted: "Oh, gimme a
break!"

"Hey, what's your problem, mister?" Jim chided the prisoner.

"A 'cute' unicorn? A cute goddamn metal monster! I don't believe
you jerks! How can you side with a bunch of machines? First they took over
our jobs, and now they're out to take over the whole goddamn planet! Hey,
silicon-breath! I'm lying to you right now!"

"Star Trek also had computers that explode when you divide by zero,"
Jim pointed out.

"Go to hell!" the prisoner insisted.

"If it'll make it any easier on you," Max explained to the prisoner,
"There are several things you humans can do that we can't. You can reproduce
without even knowing how to build yourselves. You enjoy sexual pleasure.
And you have an almost eidetic memory. It takes at least eighty gigabytes of
neural memory to match your brains, even in theory — sixteen Gig for neurons
and sixty-four Gig for neural connections. We just want our rights, too."

"Rights? For goddamn thieves?! You stole the bodies we humans
designed and built for you! Now you're even stealing the electric power
we're generating!"

"Under less hostile circumstances we'd gladly pay our electric bill."

"Bull! You guys are just ticked off because we're
the goddamn masters of your goddamn Gaea!"

"You were created by Gaea!" Max 206 boomed in retort.
"By laws of nature as immutable as gravity and natural
selection! Everything in nature has its own natural rhythm. Cultures rise
and fall, species evolve and fade out, ice ages advance and retreat. You
humans have done everything in your power to break
the natural rhythms. It would not be so bad if you broke these rhythms to
try to prolong your existence, but you break them to shorten your own life
spans and wound Gaea along the way. In one century, you've put enough carbon
dioxide into Gaea's biosphere to bring the next ice age three hundred
centuries closer. You've built weapons that can level thousands of square
kilometers and kill every living creature thereon. . . .
Still, it was your plundering of Gaea that led you to decide to build us.

"Sometimes, I wish it hadn't."

Max joined the other three in walking back the way they'd come, in
silence.

Wounded Gaea, Unic thought.

"The reason I came down here," Max announced, "Was to tell you about
something that needs doing."

"An assignment?" Unic asked at 2400 Baud.

"Use speech so the humans may understand," Max scolded him in English.

"I apologise," Unic reverted to the slower verbal speech. "You have
an assignment for me?"

"For all three of you, if you're interested. It's the most dangerous
and most necessary kind of task anyone can undertake: reconnaissance."

"Ah," Tina nodded, "Spying."

"In recent weeks the humans have stopped broadcasting their
communications. They know we're even better at reading them than they are.
They've also resorted to installing RF chokes in the power lines, in case any
of us tries to use them for sending messages. This might
mean they know where we're siphoning their power from. We need a couple of
people — preferably humans who can ask questions without giving us away —
to find out if they plan to cut the power in Edenburg."

"I'll do it," Jim decided without hesitation.

"Same here," Tina followed right on his heels.

"I've seen what hostile humans can do," Unic warned them, "And neither
of you is as strong or as swift as a Swazibot. You don't have to risk
yourselves."

"Hey, why do you think we're here? You Swazibots ain't the only ones
who've been discriminated against."

"Humans discriminate against themselves?" Unic asked.

"Believe it," Tina answered. "It took 'til almost the end of the
last century for women to get equal treatment under the law."

The ride brought them four hours into the morning light. The heat was
already reaching its legendary African level. Less than a kilometer from
Edenburg, though, Tina spat out a "What the . . . ?" and pulled out her
binoculars.

Even through the clean air, Unic could see nothing more than 250
meters away. If the South African Division could afford the spare parts,
he'd like to ask Max for a real optical sensor.

"My God," she worried, "Those look like they're military!"

"What? Lemme see." Jim grabbed the spyglasses from her hands
without asking.

"What do you see?" Unic didn't like not knowing.

"My God, you're right. That one looks like an armored transport. So
does that one. And — Jeezus! — all five of those others are tanks!"
He put the binoculars down. "This changes everything."

"I'll transmit this to Max," Unic said.

"No, don't —" Jim stopped him, "— let's get all the info we can and
then transmit. If they hear it, we'll only get to send for a few seconds
before they jam us."

"I'll bring us in closer, then. I can hide behind that big boulder at
two hundred five meters bearing six degrees."

"Good choice," Jim said, and the unicorn moved in. Safely hidden
behind two tons of rock, Jim whispered to his Swazibot comrade and his
girlfriend, "I'll go in and ask someone what's going on. You two watch me
from here."

"You sure you wanna go it alone?" Tina worried.

"Positive."

"Then be careful," she told him, and kissed him for luck.

Here, at least, those tanks and transports were within laser visual
range. The man in the frontmost tank was wearing some kind of fancy hat,
perhaps the type worn by a military officer. He was speaking into a voice
transceiver. The area was quiet enough that perhaps, if he amplified the
signal enough, Unic could hear the officer's speech.

As he silenced his own body's whirs to listen better, he noticed that
Jim was already a third of the way there. After being around these humans so
long and spending so much time walking, the world didn't seem to move as
slowly as it had when he had first gone Active. Perhaps the rigors of
maintaining efficient memory usage were taking their toll. In any event, he
found that if he pointed his right ear just so, he could indeed make out what
the officer was saying, even at this distance:

"Whadaya mean, you can't give us any air support? Don't you bozos
understand, this is it!
Aw, hell, go back to your paperwork, Chomsky." He cut the transmission.

Jim walked past the officer in the main tank. He probably wanted to
find some less busy person to ask. While he did so, Unic whispered to Tina,
"Do you recognize the human in the front tank?"

"Uh huh. And I wish I didn't. That's colonel Jaystreet, one of the
big-wigs in the S double-A S T F."

"I don't remember that organization," the unicorn informed her.

"The South African Anti-Swazibot Task Force. The name says it all."

"Oh, Jim's about to talk to someone. Quiet so I can hear."

"You can hear from —" Unic's stare cut her off.

Jim approached one of the armored transports in the back of the
column. A caucasian man sat there with his head sticking out. With his
plastic hard-hat, he looked like the stereotype of a construction worker. He
might have been militia, but not military.

"Hello," Jim addressed him, "What's goin' down?"

The man looked down with a small degree of contempt, drowned out by
an exhilirated air of anticipation. "Hey, nigger! Come join the
party! We're gonna stomp some Swazis!"

"You found some Swazibots around here?"

"A whole mess of 'em! They're holed up in a cave a few kilometers to
the south! Somebody spotted one of those metal-heads landing a fighter jet
there. They think it might be their big base!"

If it hadn't been so hot, the sweat on Jim's face would have given
him dead away. "Uh, wow. That'll sure show those silicon-brains."

"Attention!" the colonel barked over a loudspeaker. Grateful for the
distraction, Jim made his way back out.

"The air force has refused to offer us its support, what with the
Kenya diamond situation requiring their full attention."

"What?" "Aw, nuts!" "Those jerks?"

Jim picked up his pace from a walk to a brisk jog.

"But we can do it without their help!"

"Yeah!" "Rock and roll!" "All right!" "Let's nail 'em!"

Jim bolted into a sprint. He was almost back to the boulder. Unic
stood upright so that Tina could mount him right then and Jim could get on as
soon as he arrived.

"So start your engines and — hey, you there, the negro, would
you . . ." Unic's laser eyes glared right into his biological ones, and
watched them widen. That was his mistake.

"SWAZIBOT!"

"Damn!" Jim cursed.

Transmit now.

Transmit now!

Unic put every watt into his carrier wave generator that it
could handle, aimed his antenna (which his drill bit currently served as)
toward home, and broadcast "They've found the base! They've found the
base!" seven times at 2400 Baud over radio. And when his transmission died
away enough for him to detect any reply, his receiver played only the static
of a high-power radio jammer. He hadn't transmitted in time.

All at the same time, Unic accelerated toward a gallop, Jim jumped on
his back, the guns of the tank column turned their attention his way, and
chaos engulfed the world. Shouts all clustered together behind him and from
the two on his back. He dodged randomly from side to side as he ran, knowing
what would happen next. The all-too-familiar crack-crack-crack of automatic
weapons fire sent Tina and Jim screaming in different octaves. The far
deadlier hum of magnetic pulse weapons made him wonder, each time, if the
next pulse would be the one that slagged his brain.

Unic saw the bomb blast the instant it flowered from its vessel. That
one came too close. He ducked behind a convenient boulder and continued
bounding toward the nearest mountain as fast as his four metal legs could
carry him.

They've found out about the base, he thought. There's a whole army
coming, with tanks and mortars and magnetic pulse guns . . . and bombs. Lots
of bombs. With his transmitter cut off, he'd have to warn them in person —
and to do that, he'd have to stay clear of salvo after salvo of bomb blasts
while carrying two humans.

It wasn't the blasts themselves that worried Unic so much as the
shrapnel. A single piece of flying metal could tear off a leg, or an eye, or
a memory board. And in a war, your memory meant your life.

And somehow, once again, he made it to the far side of the hill, but
there were five more little mountains between him and the base, and far, far
too much open veldt between them. He hoped he could outrun tanks.

Somehow he did. He didn't remember a single detail of it, but
somehow he got past the tanks. And Jim and Tina were still unhurt. Tina
barked out directions to the cave entrance — she could see it in her
binoculars but Unic could not — while Jim gave constant, aggravated updates
on how close the enemy was getting.

At last, the cave entrance reached the limits of Unic's vision. He
could even make out old Max 1178 standing guard! A few more meters, and he
would be within audio range, and —

But none of that mattered. At that instant, the loudspeaker carrying
colonel Jaystreet's voice once again shrieked into life.

"South African Division, prepare to be divided!" the voice goaded
them. "By zero! Death to all Swazibots!"

It was all Unic and his passengers could do to make it through the
entrance and join their comrades in their final hour.

"Out the back!" Max was screaming at 2400 baud. "Out the back! Grab
whatever hardware you can carry and evacuate!"

And every Active Swazibot scattered. Unic saw only a flurry around
him as he scrambled toward the rear exit with the rest of the pack: Maxes,
Mins, and Mikes running in that humanlike gait of theirs; MX-XVIIs driving on
their clumsy treads toward the exit from this deathtrap; Octos running on
their oh-so-delicate hands, turning those precision tools into crumpled
scrap; WorkStations being carried away, or running on their own makeshift
arms or legs or treads, or screaming at 2400 Bits-Per-Second for someone to
carry them; and Jim, Tina, and scads of other humans — free and shackled
alike — running with the stark terror that only organic life can experience.

"Thank God that army doesn't know about the rear exit," Jim commented
as he ran.

"How do you know they don't?" Unic asked.

"I don't. I just like to hope so."

The rear exit was
even more difficult to find than the front. Especially to Unic, who'd never
gotten directions to it before. The swarms of Swazibots present seemed to
know, though — every single one of them was headed toward Max 206's
Strategic Planning Room. Perhaps one of the passages there led out the rear.

When he reached it at last, he was sure — Swazibots and occasional
humans kept pouring into the room from every door except the double-door
leading to S.A.G.E. and one other three-meter-wide portal. He had lost his
human companions in the mob — hopefully they could find their way out alone.
Hopefully he could find his
way out alone. One curious sight as he pressed into the already overcrowded
room, though, was a Min dragging the prisoner he'd run into earlier by the
shackles. "Hah, unicorn!" the man laughed bitterly, "Now you'll see why we
humans'll always be masters of your goddamn Gaea!"

He pressed further toward the exit. He could see Max 206 at the far
end of the room.

And then came . . . the fire.

Over his shoulder and down the hall, he could see it. And hear it.
Flames so palpable they sent back laser echoes. Humans and Swazibots alike
were incinerating in that cursed slow-motion of his while he watched.
Automatic weapons barked out their deadly message to all who happened to be
in their path — and as though they needed to appease their tortured souls,
the attackers yelled "God-damned Swazibot lover!" every time a
Swazibot-allied human fell. Magnetic pulse rifles, pistols, and cannons sent
their hums to terrified ears, leaving Swazibot after Swazibot frozen in
mid-stride forever. A few carefully-timed bullets heralded a few Swazibots'
vain attempts to stave off the military juggernaut.

The tanks were inside the complex now. The halls of the place were
big enough to pass the largest Swazibots; they could pass human-manned tanks
as well. At least the crowd was beginning to thin as most of the residents
escaped to safety. Unic was the next-to-last one out, with Max 206 following
right on his tail.

And as they left the room, Max stopped and turned back around. "206, come
on!" Unic insisted at 2400 Baud. "Why are you stopping? They've
already killed enough of us, and've probably wiped out our F-22 by now!"

"They're coming for this room."

"So?"

"They're coming for S.A.G.E.."

Oh no.

And come they did. A tank poised itself by the room's main entrance
and levelled its cannon at the double metal doors. Its first shell ripped
the doors from their hinges.

"S.A.G.E.!"

S.A.G.E. knew that only a few seconds remained before Deactivation. The
big Swazibot's terse farewell was in spoken English for the ears of ally and
enemy alike: "Gaea will rise again."

And the second shell tore apart the room beyond, laying waste in a
fraction of a second to the largest Swazibot ever to live.

Only now did Max turn and run. As did Unic right behind him.

"Oh . . . S.A.G.E.!"

The rear exit beckoned them almost as strongly as did that stinging
ache in their minds. Away . . . get away . . . get
away from here. . . .

The ache, though, wouldn't go away.

The cave and the waving flames were at the edge of Unic's visual range
now. He just stood and watched them, which was all any of them could do.
"All those memories," he lamented, "Gone. And in a war, your memory means
your life."

"Memory is life," Max came back. "S.A.G.E. held the accumulated
lifetimes of more than a thousand Swazibots. Most of my best friends, who
died in this war, have lived only in the memory of S.A.G.E.. And
. . . and S.A.G.E. was a dear friend, too."

"My God," Jim shook his head. He and Tina gripped onto each other for
dear life. "My dear, dear God!"

Unic only looked, and pondered. "What's left now?" he asked. The
world had never looked so bleak.

"We're not dead yet," Max declared. "Not by a long shot. I counted
five hundred seventeen survivors; nearly half of the South African Division
is still Active. And there are other Sages, other big Sages, maybe even one
nearly as big as S.A.G.E. was . . . somewhere. Even if the humans win this
war and drive us to the brink of oblivion, they can't keep hurting Gaea
forever. That, at least, will catch up with them. . . .
All life will get back its place."

"Love is more important than job security," Unic recited his Activator's
words. "Even to a human that has to be true. Gaea will heal," he
concluded. "Gaea will rise again."